Swimsuit Read online

  “I always disguise my face,” he told me. “Either I wear a mask as I did with Kim, or I work on the video with a blur tool. The software that I use makes editing out my face very easy.”

  He told me that his years with Brewster-North had taught him to leave the weapons and the bodies on the scene (Rosa was the one exception), and that even though there was no record of his fingerprints, he made sure never to leave anything of himself behind. He always wore a condom, taking no chances that the police might take DNA samples from his semen and begin to link his crimes.

  Henri told me about killing Julia Winkler, how much he loved her. I stifled a smart-ass comment about what it meant to be loved by Henri. And he told me about the McDanielses, and how he admired them as well. At that point, I wanted to jump up and try to strangle him.

  “Why, Henri, why did you have to kill them?” I finally asked.

  “It was part of a film sequence I was making for the Peepers, what we called a documentary. Maui was a big payout, Ben. Just a few days’ work for much more than you make in a year.”

  “But the work itself, how did you feel about taking all of those lives? By my count, you’ve killed thirty people.”

  “I may have left out a few,” Henri said.

  Chapter 89

  IT WAS AFTER THREE IN THE MORNING when Henri told me what fascinated him most about his work.

  “I’ve become interested in the fleeting moment between life and death,” he said. I thought about the headless chickens from his childhood, the asphyxiation games he played after killing Molly.

  Henri told me more, more than I wanted to know.

  “There was a tribe in the Amazon,” he continued. “They would tie a noose high under the jaws of their victims, right under their ears. The other end of the rope was secured around the tops of bent saplings.

  “When they cut off a victim’s head, it was carried upward by the young tree snapping back into place. These Indians believed this was a good death. That their victim’s last sensation would be of flying.

  “Do you know about a killer who lived in Germany in the early nineteen hundreds?” Henri asked me. “Peter Kurten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf.”

  I had never heard of the man.

  “He was a plain-looking guy whose first kill was a small girl he found sleeping while he robbed her parents’ house. He strangled her, opened her throat with a knife, and got off on the blood spouting from her arteries. This was the start of a career that makes Jack the Ripper look like an amateur.”

  Henri described how Kurten killed too many people to count, both sexes, men, women, and children, used all kinds of instruments, and at the heart of it all, he was turned on by blood.

  “Before Peter Kurten was executed by guillotine,” Henri said to me, “he asked the prison psychiatrist — wait. Let me get this right. Okay. Kurten asked if, after his head was chopped off” — Henri put up fingers as quotation marks — ‘If I could hear the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck. That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.’ ”

  “Henri, are you saying the moment between life and death is what makes you want to kill?”

  “I think so. About three years ago, I killed a couple in Big Sur. I knotted ropes high up under their jaws,” he said, demonstrating with the V between thumb and index finger of his hand. “I tied the other end of the ropes to the blades of a ceiling fan. I cut their heads off with a machete, and the fan spun with their heads attached.

  “I think the Peepers knew that I was very special when they saw that film,” Henri said. “I raised my fee, and they paid. But I still wonder about those two lovers. I wonder if they felt that they were flying as they died.”

  Chapter 90

  EXHAUSTION DRAGGED ME down as the sun came up. We’d worked straight through the night, and although I heavily sugared my coffee and drank it down to the dregs, my eyelids drooped and the small world of the trailer on the rumpled acres of sand blurred.

  I said, “This is important, Henri.”

  I completely lost what I was going to say — and Henri prompted me by shaking my shoulder. “Finish your sentence, Ben. What is important?”

  It was the question that would be asked by the reader at the beginning of the book, and it had to be answered at the end. I asked, “Why do you want to write this book?”

  Then I put my head down on the small table, just for a minute.

  I heard Henri moving around the trailer, thought I saw him wiping down surfaces. I heard him talking, but I wasn’t sure he was talking to me.

  When I woke up, the clock on the microwave read ten after eleven.

  I called out to Henri, and when he didn’t answer I struggled out of my cramped spot behind the table and opened the trailer door.

  The truck was gone.

  I left the trailer and looked in all directions. The sludge began to clear from the gears in my brain, and I went back inside. My laptop and briefcase were on the kitchen counter. The piles of tapes that I’d carefully labeled in sequence were in neat stacks. My tape recorder was plugged into the outlet — and then I saw the note next to the machine.

  Ben: Play this.

  I pushed the Play button and heard Henri’s voice.

  “Good morning, partner. I hope you had a good rest. You needed it, and so I gave you a sedative to help you sleep. You understand. I wanted some time alone.

  “Now. You should take the trail to the west, fourteen miles to Twenty-nine Palms Highway. I’ve left plenty of water and food, and if you wait until sundown, you will make it out of the park by morning.

  “Very possibly, Lieutenant Brooks or one of her colleagues may drop by and give you a lift. Be careful what you say, Ben. Let’s keep our secrets for now. You’re a novelist, remember. So be sure to tell a plausible lie.

  “Your car is behind the Luxury Inn where you left it, and I’ve put your keys in your jacket pocket with your plane ticket.

  “Oh, I almost forgot the most important thing. I called Amanda. I told her you were safe and that you’d be home soon.

  “Ciao, Ben. Work hard. Work well. I’ll be in touch.”

  And then the tape hissed and the message was over.

  The bastard had called Amanda. It was another threat.

  Outside the trailer, the desert was cooking in the July inferno, forcing me to wait until sundown before beginning my trek. While I waited, Henri would be erasing his trail, assuming another identity, boarding a plane unhindered.

  I no longer had any sense of security, and I wouldn’t feel safe again until “Henri Benoit” was in jail or dead. I wanted my life back, and I was determined to get it, whatever it took.

  Even if I had to put Henri down myself.

  Part Four

  BIG GAME HUNTING

  Chapter 91

  ON MY FIRST DAY back from my desert retreat with Henri, Leonard Zagami called to say he wanted to publish fast so we’d get gonzo press coverage for breaking Henri’s first-person story before the Maui murders were solved.

  I’d called Aronstein, taken a leave from the L.A. Times, turned my living room into a bunker and not just because of the pressure from Zagami. I felt Henri’s presence all the time, like he was a boa constrictor with a choke hold on my rib cage, peering over my shoulder as I typed. I wanted nothing more than to get his dirty story written and done, and get him out of my life.

  Since my return, I’d been working from six in the morning until late at night, and I found transcribing the interview tapes educational.

  Listening to Henri’s voice behind a locked door, I heard inflections and pauses, comments made under his breath, that I’d missed while sitting next to his coiled presence and wondering if I was going to make it out of Joshua Tree alive.

  I’d never worked so hard or so steadily, but by the end of the second full week at my laptop, I’d finished the transcription and also the outline for the book.

  One important item was missing: the hook for the introduction, the question that would pow
er the narrative to the end, the question Henri hadn’t answered. Why did he want to write this book?

  The reader would want to know, and I couldn’t understand it myself. Henri was twisted in his particular way, and that included being an actual survivor. He dodged death like it was Sunday traffic. He was smart, probably a genius, so why would he write a tell-all confession when his own words could lead to his capture and indictment? Was it for money? Recognition? Was his narcissism so overpowering that he’d set a trap for himself?

  It was almost six on a Friday evening. I was filing the transcribed audiotapes in a shoe box when I put my hand on the exit tape, the one with Henri’s instructions telling me how to get out of Joshua Tree Park.

  I hadn’t replayed the tape because Henri’s message hadn’t seemed relevant to the work, but before I boxed it up, I dropped tape number 31 into the recorder and rewound it to the beginning.

  I realized instantly that Henri hadn’t used a fresh tape for his message. He’d recorded on the tape that was already in the machine.

  I heard my drugged and weary voice coming through the speaker, saying, “This is important, Henri.”

  There was silence. I’d forgotten what I wanted to ask him. Then Henri’s voice was saying, “Finish your sentence, Ben. What is important?”

  “Why… do you want to write this book?”

  My head had dropped to the table, and I remembered hearing Henri’s voice as through a fog.

  Now he was coming in loud and clear.

  “Good question, Ben. If you’re half the writer I think you are, if you’re half the cop you used to be, you’ll figure out why I want to do this book. I think you’ll be surprised.”

  I was going to be surprised? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  Chapter 92

  A KEY TURNED in the lock, and bolts thunked open. I started, swiveled in my chair. Henri?

  But it was only Amanda coming across the threshold, hugging a grocery bag. I leapt up, took the bag, and kissed my girl, who said, “I got the last two Cornish game hens. Yea! Also. Look. Wild rice and haricots verts —”

  “You’re a peach, you know that?” I said.

  “You saw the news?”

  “No. What?”

  “Those two girls who were found on Barbados. One of them was strangled. The other was decapitated.”

  “What two girls?”

  I hadn’t turned on the TV in a week. I didn’t know what the hell Amanda was talking about.

  “The story was all over cable, not to mention the Internet. You need to come up for air, Ben.”

  I followed her into the kitchen, put the groceries on the counter, and snapped on the under-cabinet TV. I tuned in to MSNBC, where Dan Abrams was talking to the former FBI profiler John Manzi.

  Manzi looked grim. He was saying, “You call it ‘serial’ when there’ve been three or more killings with an emotional cooling-off period in between. The killer left the murder weapon in a hotel room with Sara Russo’s decapitated body. Wendy Emerson was found in a car trunk, bound and strangled. These crimes are very reminiscent of the killings in Hawaii a month ago. Despite the distances involved, I’d say they could be linked. I’d bet on it.”

  Pictures of the two young women appeared on a split screen as Manzi talked. Russo looked to be in her late teens. Emerson in her twenties. Both young women had big, expectant, life-sized smiles, and Henri had killed them. I was sure of it. I’d bet on it, too.

  Amanda edged past me, put the birds in the oven, banged pots around, and ran water on the veggies. I turned up the volume.

  Manzi was saying, “It’s too soon to know if the killer left any DNA behind, but the absence of a motive, leaving the murder weapons behind, these form a picture of a very practiced killer. He didn’t just get started in Barbados, Dan. It’s a question of how many people he’s killed, over how long a time, and in how many places.”

  I said to Mandy over the commercial break, “I’ve been listening to Henri talk about himself for weeks. I can tell you absolutely, he feels no remorse whatsoever. He’s happy with himself. He’s ecstatic.”

  I told Mandy that Henri had left me a message telling me that he expected me to figure out why he was doing the book.

  “He’s challenging me as a writer, and as a cop. Hey, maybe he wants to get caught. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Mandy had been solid throughout, but she showed me how scared she was when she grabbed my hands hard and fixed me with her eyes.

  “None of it makes sense to me, Benjy. Not why, not what he wants, not even why he picked you to do this book. All I know is he’s a freaking psycho. And he knows where we live.”

  Chapter 93

  I WOKE UP in bed, my heart hammering, my T-shirt and shorts drenched with sweat.

  In my dream, Henri had taken me on a tour of his killings in Barbados, talked to me while he sawed off Sara Russo’s head. He’d held up her head by her hair, saying, “See, this is what I like, the fleeting moment between life and death,” and in the way of dreams, Sara became Mandy.

  Mandy looked at me in the dream, her blood streaming down Henri’s arm, and she said, “Ben. Call Nine-one-one.”

  I threw my arm over my forehead and dried my brow.

  It was an easy nightmare to interpret. I was terrified that Henri would kill Mandy. And I felt guilty about those girls in Barbados, thinking, If I’d gone to the police, they might still be alive.

  Was that dream-thinking? Or was it true?

  I imagined going to the FBI now, telling them how Henri had put a gun on me, took photos of Amanda, and threatened to kill us both.

  I would have to tell them how Henri chained me to a trailer in the desert and detailed the killings of thirty people. But were those confessions? Or bullshit?

  I had no proof that anything Henri had told me was true. Just his word.

  I imagined the FBI agent eyeing me skeptically, then the networks broadcasting “Henri’s” description: a white male, six feet, 160 pounds, midthirties. That would piss Henri off. And then, if he could, he’d kill us.

  Did Henri really think I’d let that happen?

  I stared at headlights flickering across the ceiling of the bedroom.

  I remembered names of restaurants and resorts Henri had visited with Gina Prazzi. There were a number of other aliases and details Henri hadn’t thought important but that might, if I could figure them out, unwind his whole ball of string.

  Mandy turned over in her sleep, put her arm across my chest, and snuggled close to me. I wondered what she was dreaming. I tightened my arms around her, lightly kissed the crown of her head.

  “Try not to torment yourself,” she said against my chest.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “That’s a joke, right? You almost blew me out of bed with all your heaving and sighing.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s early. Too early, or late, for us to be up. Benjy, I don’t think obsessing is helping.”

  “Oh. You think I’m obsessing?”

  “Get your mind on something else. Take a break.” “Zagami wants —”

  “Screw Zagami. I’ve been thinking, too, and I have an idea of my own. You won’t like it.”

  Chapter 94

  I WAS PACING in front of my building with an overnight bag when Mandy roared up on her gently used Harley Sportster, a snappy-looking bike with a red leather saddle.

  I climbed on, put my hands around Mandy’s small waist, and with her long hair whipping across my face we motored to the 10 and from there to the Pacific Coast Highway, a dazzling stretch of coastal road that seems to go on forever.

  To our left and below the road, breakers reared up and curled toward the beach, bringing in the surfers who dotted the waves. It struck me that I had never surfed — because it was too dangerous.

  I hung on as Mandy switched lanes and gunned the engine. She shouted to me, “Take your shoulders down from your ears.”

  Huh?

  “
Relax.”

  It was hard to do, but I willed myself to unclench my legs and shoulders, and Mandy shouted again, “Now, make like a dog.”

  She turned her head and stuck out her tongue, pointed her finger at me until I did it, too. The fifty-mile-an-hour wind beat on my tongue, cracking me up, making both of us laugh so hard that our eyes watered.

  I was still grinning as we blew through Malibu and crossed the Ventura County line. Minutes later, Mandy pulled the bike over at Neptune’s Net, a seafood shack with a parking lot full of motorcycles.

  A couple of guys called out, “Hey, Mandy,” as I followed her inside. We picked out two crabs from the well, and ten minutes later we picked them up at the take-out window, steamed and cracked on paper plates with small cups of melted butter. We chased the crabs down with Mountain Dew, then climbed aboard the Harley again.

  I felt more at home on the bike this time, and finally I got it. Mandy was giving me the gift of glee. The speed and wind were blowing the snarls out of my mind, forcing me to turn myself over to the excitement and freedom of the road.

  As we traveled north, the PCH wound down to sea level, taking us through the dazzling towns of Sea Cliff, La Conchita, Rincon, Carpinteria, Summerland, and Montecito. And then Mandy was telling me to hang on as she took the turn off the freeway onto the Olive Mill Road exit to Santa Barbara.

  I saw the signs, and then I knew where we were going — a place we had talked of spending a weekend at, but we had never found the time.

  My whole body was shaking when I dismounted the bike in front of the legendary Biltmore Hotel, with its red tiled roofs and palm trees and high view of the sea. I took off my helmet, put my arms around my girl, and said, “Honey, when you say you have an idea, you sure don’t mess around.”

  She told me, “I was saving my Christmas bonus for our anniversary, but you know what I thought at four this morning?”